Vetter opines that “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” wrote the 18th century English economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who argued that an exponentially growing human population would end up being too large to be fed by the planet’s finite resources. Malthus’s words echo throughout the runtime of the new Michael Moore-produced documentary Planet of the Humans. This video polemic against the renewable energy industry, written and directed by long-time Moore associate Jeff Gibbs, contends that the Earth has simply too many people.
The film has generated no small amount of controversy, being lambasted by environmentalists and scientists for its approach, and being seized upon by climate skeptics as vindication of their views. Michael Moore, who holds an executive producer credit on the film, has defended the film, saying it is intended to be a warning about the involvement of corporate America in the environmental movement. But that isn’t the message taken home by many who have watched it. Corporate fossil fuel-backed groups such as the libertarian Heartland Institute have boosted the film, and far-right politics blog Breitbart, backed by Trump backer and climate skeptic Robert Mercer, has said the film shows renewable energy is more polluting than fossil fuels. Far from taking a chunk out of corporate America, Planet of the Humans has been turned into a cudgel by big oil and the super rich.
At around seven minutes into the film, Jeff Gibb, long-time associates of Michael More, who directs, narrates and edits the film, delivers his first “gotcha” moment when he visits a solar power festival in Vermont. The organizers say the festival is powered by 100% solar energy, but as it begins to rain, it’s clear there’s a problem: the solar panels aren’t generating enough juice to keep the power on. Gibbs pounces on members of staff who are busy hooking up to the mains supply to keep the main stage running; solar power, we are shown, can’t be relied on to keep the lights on and the PA powered up.
Right off the bat, Gibbs is indulging in an argument called the baseload power fallacy, which says that conventional energy generation—fossil fuels or nuclear power—is required to produce electricity because some renewable energy sources, such as wind and sun, are intermittent. This argument has for decades been deployed by renewable energy opponents who don’t understand how modern power grids work. Energy systems today are increasingly decentralized, with diverse energy sources generating power, and an increasing array of ways to store that energy in times of surplus. And as grids decentralize still further, the need for large, centralized, fossil or nuclear-fueled plants decreases. Yet Gibbs returns to this outdated argument repeatedly throughout the film.
The film cuts to Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, noting that the Obama administration put $100 billion into green energy development. Gibbs says that’s when investors such as Richard Branson and banks like Goldman Sachs GSBD began investing in renewable energy projects. This is the first indication of what Moore, for his part, claims is the film’s central theme: that corporate power has a large stake in renewable energy, which is bad.
Gibbs goes down the street to look at a solar project that is producing 64,000 kilowatt hours a year—enough to meet the energy requirements of just 10 homes. Here the message is that solar power is an expensive, inefficient boondoggle—and indeed, in 2010, when the footage was taken, solar power was inefficient and expensive. Ten years later, through new developments in the field and in production, solar photovoltaic panels are massively more efficient, and far cheaper. Renewables are already, in many cases, cheaper than fossil fuels.
Gibbs also debunks wind power. He visits an onshore wind farm project in Michigan where he is told that wind turbines are large and heavy, and require a large amount of concrete to be poured for the base. “Is it possible,” Gibbs muses, “for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” That question unanswered, we return to Vermont, where local residents are visiting a 21-turbine build. Told that the turbines would have a lifespan of 20 years, Gibbs gasps in disbelief. He asks those assembled the leading question of whether the project is “mountaintop removal for wind instead of coal,” two things that those present agree are equally bad.
Another of the locals expounds on the inefficiency of wind power, claiming that “cycling up” and “cycling down” wind turbines creates a bigger carbon footprint “than if you just ran it straight.” “Let’s just say the wind stopped for an hour, right now. You’ve got to have that power,” he says. This is a variant of the baseload power fallacy, plus a further fallacy, central to the film’s premise, that renewable energy generation generates the same amount of emissions as fossil fuel generation. This simply isn’t true: even an old meta-analysis of studies on windfarms, produced back in 2010 when turbines were far less efficient than they are now, found that an average turbine generates 20 times more energy than it takes to produce. New research from Denmark indicates modern onshore turbines could have a far longer lifespan than originally anticipated—up to 35 years on average.
Gibbs next lays into hydrogen technology, getting a hydrogen car salesman to admit that, at the time of filming, most hydrogen was being sourced from natural gas and oil. Gibbs is either unaware of—or unwilling to talk about—the practically limitless potential of green hydrogen from 100% renewable sources, which is being rolled out worldwide, with 100+ megawatt facilities planned in many countries.
Gibbs next takes aim at the effort, spearheaded in the U.S. by such groups as Sierra Club, to replace coal plants with natural gas. Natural gas, also a fossil fuel, is certainly a poor choice from a climate perspective, and has probably led to an increase in atmospheric methane levels. But Gibbs infers that natural gas is equally as harmful as coal; he entirely neglects to explain that natural gas, though a hydrocarbon, produces 50% to 60% less CO2 than coal, and massively less particulate pollution. As such, in most developed economies natural gas is considered a “bridge fuel” to be deployed until hydrocarbons are phased out.
Gibbs then returns to variations on the baseload power fallacy, with a smattering of “industry insiders” touting the antiquated logic. In 2020, you’ll be hard pressed to find a reputable industry insider who considers intermittency an impediment to the low-carbon transition. In the words of Carbon Tracker, “variability is simply an issue to be managed, not an insoluble impediment.”
Gibbs then dishes out what he knows about power storage. “When I looked up how much battery storage there is,” he says, “it was less than one tenth of one percent of what’s needed. In a couple of years they begin to degrade, and need to be replaced a few years later.” Here he is presumably referring to lithium ion batteries, which are just one of many large scale solutions to energy storage currently available. Far more interesting, sustainable and scalable options are pump hydro, gravity, cryogenic, saltwater, air and kinetic storage, to name a few. And that is to say nothing of the potential of graphene, which will make conventional batteries massively more efficient. Energy storage in advanced economies is growing rapidly. The International Renewable Energy Agency forecasts that global energy storage will increase by 40% every year until 2025, while smaller, decentralized storage facilities will balance electricity demand across networks.
While absorbing the above and other realizations in the article, Vetter indicates that it’s important to note that the core contention of overpopulation could itself be a fallacy: those who study population growth consistently make the point that across the developed world, populations are actually declining. Rapid population growth is now the preserve of developing countries, particularly in Africa, taking us back to the truly sinister suggestions of Ehrlich. But Gibbs doesn’t discuss these details.
Wrapping up the film, Gibbs returns to Malthus, intoning morosely: “There is a way out of this: we humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. We must accept that our human presence is already far beyond sustainability, and all that that implies”—though what that implies isn’t addressed. He goes on: “We must take control of our environmental movement and our future, from billionaires and their permanent war on planet Earth”—though no tips on how to achieve this are forthcoming. “Less must be the new more,” he adds. “Instead of climate change, we must at long last accept that it’s not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet —it’s us.” The film ends with a gritty, harrowing montage of environmental destruction, accompanied by emotive music.
Like any industry, the renewable energy sector should be probed consistently and in detail. Hard questions should be asked of its proponents to ensure accountability and to determine that what they are offering lives up to the not-inconsiderable hype. More than ever, humanity needs to believe it is able to do the right things for the right reasons, and subjecting those things and those reasons to scrutiny can help to build trust and inform policy. But that scrutiny and those investigations need to be thorough; they must be carried out from a position that is well-informed and current. Packaging vague, ill-informed attacks and outdated arguments as serious inquiry enables such work to be used as a cudgel by genuinely bad-faith, nefarious causes—as Jeff Gibbs and his allies are now finding. At the same time, by identifying what they see as problems but failing to offer any proposals to address them, Gibbs and Moore’s film rings pessimistic and hollow. Without offering any way forward or out, the unspoken message of the film is: “what’s the point?”
In which case, what was the point of making the film, asks Vetter ?
[Note: in attempting to summarize the salient points made by Vetter Concerning the Michael More / Jeff Gibbs video, the I2M Web Portal editors have omitted many other points of interest. The whole Vetter article should be read and the Moore/Gibbs video should be watched in order to come to gripes with the conflagration of misrepresentations / commissions by both Vetter in opposition to the More/Gibbs positions in the video and by the video, which also contains serious exaggerations and misrepresentations. Taken together, follow-up work is needed to sort out what the actual conditions are in the renewable energy fields, especially focusing on operation and maintenance costs, system useful life times, and the need of grid power to support solar and and assist wind systems, with and without battery back-up. For example, do the pros and cons of solar and wind systems still apply or has the newer systems overcome previous criticisms? Such as for solar and for wind.]
Original working URL:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/05/13/what-michael-moores-new-climate-documentary-gets-wrong-about-renewables/#9b607ac464d6
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